We the Teachers

The Atlantic Charter

During the first two years of World War II, Roosevelt and Churchill worked closely together, not only in making American resources available for the British war effort. They also prepared a political strategy that would clarify their joint war aims once events made America’s entry in the war inevitable. In August 1941 the two men met aboard a US Naval vessel off the coast of Newfoundland agreed upon a joint declaration, The Atlantic Charter. In this document one can trace the beginning outlines of the organization that would later become the United Nations. One also finds language Roosevelt had used in his State of the Union Address the previous January, where he described the “four freedoms” he hoped that the war effort would secure for a world-wide community. In fact, the document was shaped more in line with Roosevelt’s Wilsonian idealism than with the interests of Britain, which was still an imperial power. Roosevelt wanted the charter to promise a world that, he thought, Americans would see as worth going to war to secure; and Churchill, who above all wanted to bring the Americans into the Allied war effort, allowed Roosevelt to take the lead.